Default Autoloading in Perl

Perl offers a feature which you would not find in any other programming languages: a default subroutine. Which means, if you define a function called AUTOLOAD(), then any calls to undefined subroutines will call AUTOLOAD() function automatically. The name of the missing subroutine is accessible within this subroutine as $AUTOLOAD.

Default autoloading functionality is very useful for error handling. Here is an example to implement AUTOLOAD, you can implement this function in your own way.

sub AUTOLOAD {
   my $self = shift;
   my $type = ref ($self) || croak "$self is not an object";
   my $field = $AUTOLOAD;
   $field =~ s/.*://;
   unless (exists $self->{$field}) {
      croak "$field does not exist in object/class $type";
   }
   if (@_) {
      return $self->($name) = shift;
   } else {
      return $self->($name);
   }
}